[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 21 (Tuesday, March 1, 2005)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1870-S1872]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

      By Mr. LEAHY:
  S. 478. A bill to designate the annex to the E. Barrett Prettyman 
Federal Building and United States Courthouse located at 333 
Constitution Avenue Northwest in the District of Columbia as the 
``William B. Bryant Annex''; to the Committee on Environment and Public 
Works.
  Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, I am pleased to call attention to the 
extraordinary public service of Judge William B. Bryant. Last July, I 
introduced S. 2619, a bill that would have designated the new annex to 
the E. Barrett Prettyman United States Courthouse in Washington, D.C., 
the ``William B. Bryant Annex.'' It was the Senate companion bill to 
legislation introduced by Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton of the 
District of Columbia.
  While the House bill passed by voice vote, the Senate bill was 
stalled by objection. There was concern that a courthouse annex be 
named for a judge still serving. This objection was adhered to despite 
the numerous exceptions to such a rule, including another exception 
enacted last year.
  It would have been worthy of celebration this last month, during 
Black History Month, if we could have held such a naming ceremony 
involving Judge Bryant. Others prevented that from taking place. I 
believe it important that we continue every month to recognize the 
extraordinary contributions of African Americans. Congresswoman Norton 
has been willing to seek to accommodate those Senators who objected by 
revising this bill to delay the effective date of the naming until 
after Judge Bryant steps down from the Court. It is sadly ironic that 
Judge Bryant's continuing historic service is held against honoring 
him. He continues to perform duties as a senior

[[Page S1871]]

Federal judge at the age of 93. I commend Congresswoman Norton for her 
efforts and determination. I hope that this change will remove the 
final impediment and allow the District of Columbia and the Nation to 
honor Judge Bryant before his 94th birthday this September.
  The value of Judge Bryant's service has been recognized by his 
colleagues. Judge Bryant and his lifelong service to the law was 
celebrated in a September 16, 2004 Washington Post article. The article 
details a life spent dedicated to public service.
  Judge Bryant began his legal career with the belief that lawyers 
could make a difference in eliminating the widespread racial 
segregation in the United States. He became a criminal defense lawyer 
in 1948, taking on many pro bono cases and was soon recognized by the 
U.S. Attorney's office for his skills as a defense attorney. The U.S. 
Attorney's office hired him in 1951 and he became the first African 
American to practice in Federal court here in the District.
  Judge Bryant was nominated by President Johnson to the Federal bench 
in 1965 and became the first African American Chief Judge for the 
United States District Court in D.C. Forty years later, Judge Bryant 
still works at the courthouse four days a week and the Washington Post 
reports that he handled more criminal trials than any other senior 
judge on the court last year. Judge Bryant said in an interview with 
the Post: ``I feel like I'm part of the woodwork. I have to think hard 
to think of a time when I wasn't in this courthouse.''
  The Washington Post article mentions that E. Barrett Prettyman, Jr., 
the son of the judge for whom the Federal courthouse is named, praised 
the recommendation that the annex be named after Judge Bryant. He said 
that his father ``admired Judge Bryant tremendously'' and would have 
wanted the annex to be named after him.
  Before my introduction of this bill last year, Chief Judge Thomas F. 
Hogan of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, 
requested for himself and all the other judges on the court that the 
newly constructed annex be named after Judge Bryant. They appreciate 
the historic significance of Judge Bryant's service.
  I urge the Senate this year to move ahead with this important 
commendation of Judge Bryant's lifetime of service and dedication to 
the principles of the Constitution and the law.
  I ask unanimous consent that an article and the text of the bill be 
printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

               [From the Washington Post, Sept. 16, 2004]

  A Lifetime of Faith in the Law; at 93, Senior Judge William Bryant 
             Still Wins Plaudits for Dedication to Justice

                           (By Carol Leonnig)

       A few days after the new U.S. District Courthouse opened on 
     Constitution Avenue in the fall of 1952, Bill Bryant walked 
     in to start work as a recently hired federal prosecutor.
       More than a half-century has passed, and Bryant's life 
     remains centered on that stately granite building in the 
     shadow of the U.S. Capitol. It's in those halls that he 
     became a groundbreaking criminal defense attorney, a federal 
     judge, and then the court's chief judge--the first African 
     American in that position.
       Today, at the age of 93, U.S. District Court Senior Judge 
     William Bryant still drives himself to work at the courthouse 
     four days a week and pushes his walker to his courtroom.
       At a recent birthday party for Bryant hosted by Vernon 
     Jordan, fellow Senior U.S. District Court Judge Louis 
     Oberdorfer remarked that there were ``only two people in the 
     world who really understood the Constitution'' and how it 
     touched the lives of real people.
       ``That's Hugo Black and Bill Bryant,'' said Oberdorfer. He 
     had clerked for Justice Hugo L. Black, who retired as an 
     associate justice in 1971 after serving on the Supreme Court 
     for 34 years.
       To honor Bryant's life's work, his fellow judges this past 
     spring unanimously recommended that a nearly completed 
     courthouse annex be named for him. The $110 million, 351,000-
     square-foot addition will add nine state-of-the-art 
     courtrooms and judges' offices to the courthouse and is 
     designed to meet the court's expansion needs for the next 30 
     years. It is slated to open next spring.
       In urging that the building be named for Bryant, his 
     supporters cite his devotion to the Constitution and his 
     belief that the law will produce a just result.
       During a rare interview in his sixth-floor office in the 
     federal courthouse, Bryant reached out for a pocket version 
     of the Constitution covered in torn green plastic lying on 
     the top of his desk. Holding it aloft in his right hand, he 
     told stories of his struggling former clients and made legal 
     phrases--``due process'' and ``equal protection''--seem like 
     life-saving staples.
       Though he needs his law clerk's arm to get up the steps to 
     the bench, he is a fairly busy senior jurist. He handled more 
     criminal trials than any other senior judge last year and 
     still surprises new lawyers with his sharp retorts.
       ``I feel like I'm part of the woodwork,'' Bryant said. ``I 
     have to think hard to think of a time when I wasn't in this 
     courthouse.''
       He started down his career path inspired by a Howard 
     University law professor who believed that lawyers could make 
     a difference in that time of racial segregation and 
     discrimination. Bryant said he remains convinced today that 
     lawyers can stop injustice whenever it arises.
       ``Without lawyers, this is just a piece of paper,'' Judge 
     Bryant said, gesturing with the well-worn Constitution. ``If 
     it weren't for lawyers, I'd still be three-fifths of a man. 
     If it weren't for lawyers, we'd still have signs directing 
     people this way and that, based on the color of their skin. 
     If it weren't for lawyers, you still wouldn't be able to 
     vote.
       ``The most important professions are lawyer and teacher, in 
     my opinion,'' he said.
       Some lawyers complain that Bryant is so rooted in his 
     criminal defense training that he shows some distrust of the 
     prosecution. And his practice of presiding over trials, but 
     asking other judges to sentence the people convicted, has 
     spurred some curiosity. He won't elaborate on the reason, but 
     his friends say he found the new federal sentencing 
     guidelines inflexible and harsh.
       A 1993 study found Bryant was reversed 17 percent of the 
     time by appellate judges--the average reversal rate for the 
     trial court.
       Chief Judge Thomas F. Hogan presented the proposal to name 
     the annex after Bryant to Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton and Sen. 
     Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) earlier this year, and they are now 
     trying to get Congress to approve the naming this fall. One 
     member, Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), has tried to block 
     it, with his staff pointing to a D.C. policy that buildings 
     not be named after living people.
       Norton said numerous courts around the country have been 
     named in honor of living judges, and she said she looks 
     forward to meeting with Inhofe in person to convince him of 
     the wisdom of naming this building, designed by renowned 
     architect Michael Graves, after a barrier-breaking judge.
       ``This is no ordinary naming,'' she said. ``This is a truly 
     great African American judge whose accomplishments are 
     singular. First African American assistant U.S. attorney. 
     First African American chief judge.''
       E. Barrett Prettyman Jr., the son of the jurist for whom 
     the federal courthouse in Washington is named, also applauds 
     the proposed annex naming. He said his father ``admired Judge 
     Bryant tremendously'' and would have endorsed it, too.
       ``Whenever it's discussed, people brighten right up and 
     think it's a great idea,'' said Prettyman, himself a former 
     president of the D.C. Bar Association. ``I'm sorry it's hit 
     this snag. . . . If you were going to have an exception, my 
     personal opinion is you could not have a better exception 
     than for Judge Bryant.''
       William Benson Bryant is hailed as a true product of 
     Washington. Though he was born in a rural town in Alabama, he 
     moved to the city soon after turning 1. His grandfather, 
     fleeing a white lynch mob, relocated the extended family 
     here, including Bryant's father, a railroad porter, and his 
     mother, a housewife. They all made their first home on 
     Benning Road, which was then a dirt path hugging the eastern 
     shore of the Anacostia River.
       Bryant attended D.C. public schools when the city's black 
     children were taught in separate and grossly substandard 
     facilities. Still he flourished, studying politics at the 
     city's premier black high school, Dunbar, then going on to 
     Howard University. While working at night as an elevator 
     operator, he studied law and met his future wife, Astaire. 
     They were married for 60 years, until her death in 1997.
       He and his law classmates--the future civil rights 
     movement's intellectual warriors--worked at their dreams in 
     the basement office of their law professor, Charles Houston. 
     Houston promised the group, which included the future Supreme 
     Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and appellate judge 
     Spottswood Robinson, that lawyers armed with quick minds and 
     the Constitution could end segregated schools and unjust 
     convictions of innocent black men.
       ``I kind of got fascinated by that,'' he said. ``We all 
     did.''
       But when Bryant graduated first in his class from Howard's 
     law school, there were no jobs for a black lawyer. He became 
     a chief research assistant to Ralph Bunche, an African 
     American diplomat who later was awarded the Nobel Peace 
     Prize, on a landmark study of American race relations; he 
     then fought in World War II and was discharged from the Army 
     as a lieutenant colonel in 1947.
       His first step was to take the bar exam, then hang out a 
     shingle as a criminal defense lawyer in 1948. His skills soon 
     drew the attention of prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney's 
     Office, who liked him even though they kept losing cases to 
     him, and they recommended that their boss hire him. During a 
     job interview, Bryant made a request of George Fay,

[[Page S1872]]

     then the U.S. attorney: ``Mr. Fay, if I cut the mustard in 
     municipal court, can I go over to the big court like the 
     other guys?''
       No black prosecutor had ever practiced in the federal 
     court--or ``big court,'' as it was called--but Fay agreed. 
     Bryant signed on in 1951 and was handling grand jury 
     indictments in the new federal courthouse the next year.
       Bryant vividly recalls a case from that time involving an 
     apartment building caretaker who was on trial on charges of 
     raping the babysitter of one tenant's family.
       ``I went for him as hard as I could,'' Bryant said, 
     squaring his shoulders. ``I didn't like him, and I didn't 
     like what he did to that girl.''
       So the young prosecutor sought the death penalty, an option 
     then for first-degree murder and rape. He left the courtroom 
     after closing arguments ``feeling pretty good about my case'' 
     and awaited the jury's verdict in his third-floor court 
     office. But when a marshal later called out, ``Bryant, 
     jury's back,'' the judge said, ``I broke out in a sweat.''
       He peeked anxiously into the court, saw the jury foreman 
     mouth only the word ``guilty.'' Bryant learned seconds later 
     that the jurors had spared the man's life.
       ``I was so relieved,'' he said. ``When you're young, you 
     don't know anything. . . . Now I think, murder is murder, no 
     matter who is doing it.''
       He left the prosecutor's office in 1954 and returned to 
     criminal defense with fellow classmate William Gardner in an 
     F Street law office later bulldozed for the MCI Center. They 
     were partners in Houston, Bryant and Gardner, a legendarily 
     powerful African American firm. Ten judges would eventually 
     come from its ranks.
       In those days, Bryant chuckled, he didn't feel so powerful. 
     Judges who remembered his prosecution work kept appointing 
     him to represent defendants who had no money. That was before 
     the 1963 Supreme Court's Gideon decision requiring that 
     indigent defendants be represented by a lawyer--at public 
     expense, if necessary.
       ``The judge would say, `Mr. So and So, you say you don't 
     have any money to hire an attorney?' '' Bryant recalled. `` 
     `Well, then, the court appoints Mr. Bryant to represent you.' 
     ''
       Some paid $25 or $50. Some paid nothing.
       ``There were weeks we paid the help and split the little 
     bit left over for our groceries,'' he said.
       Bill Schultz, Bryant's former law clerk, said Bryant took 
     the cases ``out of this sense of obligation to the court and 
     legal system. He was very aware of discrimination, and he 
     always fought for the criminal defendants.''
       At the time, blacks were barred from the D.C. Bar 
     Association and its law library. Bryant went in anyway, and 
     the black librarian let him.
       One of his pro bono clients was Andrew Roosevelt Mallory, a 
     19-year-old who confessed to a rape after an eight-hour 
     interrogation in a police station. Mallory was convicted and 
     sent to death row. Defending Mallory's rights, a case Bryant 
     took all the way to the Supreme Court in 1957, made him both 
     nervous and famous.
       He said he fretted constantly about his client facing the 
     electric chair during the two years the case dragged on. 
     ``You talk about worried,'' he said. ``It's something I can't 
     forget.''
       But the Supreme Court agreed with Bryant that a man accused 
     of a crime is entitled to be taken promptly before a 
     magistrate to hear the charges against him. The court 
     overturned Mallory's conviction and handed down a landmark 
     decision on defendants' rights.
       U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman, a longtime fan of 
     Bryant's, said Bryant's legal talents are on display every 
     day in his courtroom, but lawyers are still taken aback by 
     his factual resolve and clear logic when hearing an audiotape 
     recording of his Supreme Court argument in the Mallory case.
       ``He's clearly a terrific lawyer, but he's mostly a 
     terrific human being,'' Friedman said. ``He sees the best in 
     people, and he really cares about what happens to people.''
       Bryant remembers that when President Lyndon B. Johnson 
     nominated him to be a judge, he felt elated, confident he had 
     earned his opportunity. But Bryant said a different feeling 
     came over him the day he donned the robes.
       ``I was sworn in in the morning that day, and Oliver Gasch 
     was sworn in that afternoon,'' Bryant recalled. ``I told 
     Oliver, `You know, I've been a lawyer for many years, but 
     putting on this robe, I don't feel so sure. This is a serious 
     responsibility. ' ''
       Gasch smiled: ``Bill, I don't think it's going to be that 
     hard for you. You know right from wrong.''
       Bryant oversaw some famous cases, and he freely shared his 
     thoughts when he thought something was wrong.
       After presiding over the 1981 trial of Richard Kelly, a 
     Republican congressman caught on videotape taking money from 
     federal agents in a sting operation, Bryant complained that 
     the FBI had set an ``outrageous'' trap for the Florida 
     representative by stuffing cash in his pocket after he'd 
     refused the bribe several times. He set aside Kelly's 
     conviction.
       ``The investigation . . . has an odor to it that is 
     absolutely repulsive,'' Bryant said then. ``It stinks.''
       In handling the longest-running case in the court's 
     history, a 25-year-old case about inhumane and filthy 
     conditions in the D.C. jail, the judge chastised city leaders 
     in 1995. He said he had been listening to their broken 
     promises to fix the problems ``since the Big Dipper was a 
     thimble.''
       In weighing the case of a group of black farmers with 
     similar discrimination complaints against the U.S. Department 
     of Agriculture in 2000, Bryant warned a government lawyer 
     that his argument against a class-action discrimination suit 
     wasn't working: ``Either you're dense or I'm dense,'' he 
     said.
       Schultz said the judge simply trusted the combination of 
     facts and the law.
       ``He always said, `Don't fight the facts,' '' Schultz said. 
     ``He thought most of the time the law would end up in the 
     right place.''
       Bryant acknowledges it's hard sometimes to see lawyers 
     struggle to make their arguments when they have the law and 
     the facts on their side.
       ``A judge has a stationary gun, and he's looking through 
     the sights,'' he said. ``Unless the lawyer brings the case 
     into the bull's-eye, the judge can't pull the trigger. Good 
     lawyers bring the case into the sights.''
       Bryant said he was preceded by many great lawyers, which is 
     why the new plan to put his name on a piece of the courthouse 
     gives him conflicting feelings.
       ``I was flattered, but I thought they shouldn't have done 
     it,'' Bryant said. ``There are so many people who were really 
     giants. I stand on their shoulders.''
                                  ____


                                 S. 478

       Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of 
     the United States of America in Congress assembled,

     SECTION 1. DESIGNATION.

       The annex to the E. Barrett Prettyman Federal Building and 
     United States Courthouse located at Constitution Avenue 
     Northwest in the District of Columbia shall be known and 
     designated as the ``William B. Bryant Annex''.

     SEC. 2. REFERENCES.

       Any reference in a law, map, regulation, document, paper, 
     or other record of the United States to the annex referred to 
     in section 1 shall be deemed to be a reference to the 
     ``William B. Bryant Annex''.

     SEC. 3. EFFECTIVE DATE.

       This Act takes effect on the date on which William B. 
     Bryant, a senior judge for the United States District Court 
     for the District of Columbia, relinquishes or otherwise 
     ceases to hold a position as a judge under article III of the 
     Constitution.
                                 ______